Taylor at Forbes: A Game-Changing Study Finds Half Of Global Warming Is Fictitious

A reanalysis of U.S. temperature station data shows temperatures are rising only half as much as claimed by the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) and other government overseers of temperature data. The reanalysis is the first using the Siting Classification System devised by the MATEO-France French national meteorological service and recently approved by the World Meteorological Organization.

The new analysis, conducted by a team of scientists led by temperature station expert Anthony Watts, shows government overseers are improperly reporting double the temperature increase that is occurring in the real world. Fully 92 percent of the overstated temperature rise results from erroneous and scientifically unjustified government “adjustments” to the raw temperature data.

The new analysis shows U.S. temperatures rose only 0.155 degrees Celsius per decade from 1979 through 2008 according to high-quality surface temperature stations. The 0.155 degree increase is substantially less than is claimed by government temperature overseers, and it is sufficiently moderate to rebut fears of an imminent global warming crisis. The U.S. temperature increase from 1979 through 2008 is even less worrisome when considering that temperatures over the oceans are warming at a slower pace than temperatures over land, and that global temperatures cooled during the 30 years prior to 1979.

The authors note global temperature trends are unlikely to be substantially different from the U.S. temperature trends analyzed in their new analysis.

Lead author Anthony Watts explained how government overseers overlook meaningful siting problems that add fictitious warming to the raw data.

“The USHCN is one of the main metrics used to gauge the temperature changes in the United States,” wrote Watts in a press release announcing the findings. “The first wide-scale effort to address siting issues, Watts, (2009), a collated photographic survey, showed that approximately 90% of USHCN stations were compromised by encroachment of urbanity in the form of heat sinks and sources, such as concrete, asphalt, air conditioning system heat exchangers, roadways, airport tarmac, and other issues. This finding was backed up by an August 2011 U.S. General Accounting Office investigation and report titled: Climate Monitoring: NOAA Can Improve Management of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network.”

The authors also explain how government overseers’ improper manipulation of the raw temperature data manufactures fictitious warming. According to the authors:

Government overseers of the raw data improperly adjust temperatures from poorly sited stations upward, and then add similar nonexistent warming to temperature data from well-sited stations.

After government overseers improperly adjust the temperature readings from well-sited stations, they report three times as much warming from those stations as the raw data indicate.

Urban temperature stations report more warming than semi-urban stations, which in turn report more warming than rural stations. These findings support skeptics’ claims that the urban heat island effect is substantially responsible for reports of rising temperatures.

The new paper throws cold water on this week’s sensationalist media coverage of claims by Cal-Berkeley professor Richard Muller that his research confirms United Nations temperature reports. Muller, who embarrassingly seeks media coverage by claiming to be a long-time global warming skeptic when in fact he has been pushing the myth of a global warming crisis for at least the past decade, bases his conclusions on the government-adjusted temperature reports that are debunked in the Watts paper.

James M. Taylor is a senior fellow for environmental policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News, a national monthly publication devoted to sound science and free-market environmentalism with a circulation of approximately 75,000 readers. He is also senior fellow for The Heartland Institute focusing on environmental issues.
He is author of What Climate Scientists Think about Global Warming (Heartland Institute, 2007) and coauthor of State Greenhouse Gas Programs: An Economic and Scientific Analysis (Heartland Institute, 2003) and New Source Review: An Evaluation of EPA's Reform Recommendations (Heartland Institute, 2002).
He has presented environmental analysis on the CBS Evening News, CNN, and Fox News Channel; on numerous national radio programs; and in virtually every major newspaper in the country.
Taylor received his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and his law degree from the Syracuse University College of Law, where he was president of the local chapter of the Federalist Society and founder and editor-in-chief of the Federalist Voice.

. . . It should be self-evident that air rising from urban heat sources has to come down somewhere, and that the circulation would result in cooled air aloft sinking into rural areas. Focusing on temperatures in any one area (USA) isolated from all others is also misleading, as the warming effect is much greater in arctic latitudes (witness the thinning and retreat of the ice in the Arctic Ocean, and retreat by nearly all glaciers worldwide) than those closer to the equator. Ironically, more open water in the Arctic will result in heavier snowfalls in the winter from its heat and evaporation, similar to “lake-effect” snows downwind from the Great Lakes into Michigan, the Ohio Valley, PA, and NY. Equally important as oceanic temperature rise, which yes is slower than atmospheric, is increasing acidity in the seas and its effect on sea life. Must we wait until “Soylent Green” to realize it’s time NOW to stop pollution of all kinds? We need to develop cheap electric production to support the ten billion of us living in the second half of this century. International cooperation and investment could result in this, by employing the noble plan of Houston’s Dr. David R. Criswell, using proved technology to bring cheap electricity to every person on Earth… http://lunarsolarpowersystem.blogspot.com (coming soon, a new website, http://lunarsolarpower.org will promote LSP). With electricity produced even on Earth using renewable wind, geothermal, and oceanic sources, real solutions to employment, ecology, and energy are described by scientist and registered U.S. Presidential candidate Harry Braun for a Solar-Hydrogen Economy. Producing hydrogen for fuel and energy storage requires no direct mining or drilling, does not destroy needed water supplies, and burns absolutely clean, returning pure water. Study http://Braun2012.US and learn also about needed 21st-Century U.S. Constitutional amendments.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model
that makes the existing model obsolete.”
— R. Buckminister Fuller